A US appeals court has ruled that bulk collection of phone records by the National Security Agency (NSA) is illegal.

Despite overturning a 2013 decision, the court stopped short of asking the US Congress to halt the program, but did strongly urge them to take action. Legal experts and privacy campaigners have hailed the verdict, saying the landmark decision has effectively paved the way for a full legal challenge against the legitimacy of the NSA.

The ruling also called into question the validity of the reauthorisation of a key “Patriot Act” provision that is currently being debated by US legislators. The current provision of the anti-terrorism act will expire on 1st June, but the court sent a warning – believed to be aimed at Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate – that it could not be reauthorized without significant amendments.

The phone records of law abiding citizens are none of the NSA’s business! Pleased with the ruling this morning. pic.twitter.com/y4FBePt6h6

Senator Rand Paul, a Republican presidential candidate in 2016 who has been highly critical of the NSA and its methods, praised the ruling in a Tweet – saying: “The phone records of law abiding citizens are none of the NSA’s business! Pleased with the ruling this morning”.

NSA has been tapping domestic communications for years, something that originally came to light in 2006 with PRISM and AT&T’s infamous Room 641AWhat Is PRISM? Everything You Need to KnowWhat Is PRISM? Everything You Need to KnowThe National Security Agency in the US has access to whatever data you're storing with US service providers like Google Microsoft, Yahoo, and Facebook. They're also likely monitoring most of the traffic flowing across the...Read More. The “interception room”, which was operated at the request of the NSA, captured communications from AT&T’s networks, processed them, stored them, and then forward them to the bureau for further analysis.

The system was ended after a class action lawsuit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but it was only the tip of the iceberg. Over time it transpired that major tech companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Facebook, and Skype had all been part of the surveillance and had wilfully handed over details of their users when requested to do so.

On the flipside, could it reduce your safety? Is there not an argument for the retention of at least some surveillance powers? Barely a month goes by without us hearing about a thwarted terror plot – as recently as Mother’s Day news came out of Australia about police capturing a teenager who had planned to detonate three bombs in Melbourne city centre. While people may have just cause to being furious at their private communications being monitored, would they not be more furious if some of the 29 attempted terror attacks on US soil since 9/11 had been successful? Which is more valuable?

How Can You Protect Yourself?

At the moment it’s unclear if collection will end or not. Whatever the outcome, given the court didn’t force it to stop it’s likely to be years before we get a conclusion, as the unwieldy US legal and political systems lumber towards a final decision.

Despite these tips, it’s worth remembering each of them makes your web browsing more cumbersome and time-consuming, and in practice would not stand up to much pressure if you came under serious investigation. One recent study found that because human mobility is so unique, the NSA only needed four location points to correctly identify a user 95 percent of the time. Is the time and energy spent on avoidance really worth it? You need to decide.

How do you see the future?

How do you see the future for the NSA? Does it have a future, or is this court ruling the beginning of the end? Are you happy with levels of surveillance remaining the same, or would you sacrifice safety for privacy?

As countries like the UK look to emulate the NSA with the recently announced “Snooper’s Charter”, should the United States not instead by championing the success of its project? Perhaps there is an argument that it’s merely a PR disaster, but the ethics and reasoning behind the project is valid – for example, would there have been such public outcry if the American government had been more open and said “this is what we are doing and why we are doing it” back in 2001?

As ever, we’d love your input. Let us know your thoughts on the court’s decision and your wider opinions about the NSA in the comments section below.

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Ilya Geller

May 14, 2015 at 12:41 pm

Good news! The Era of Absolute Privacy is coming! No need in queries, cookies or browsing history anymore. NSA is harmless: NSA will simply have nothing to spy after.

I discovered and patented how to structure any data: Language has its own Internal parsing, indexing and statistics. For instance, there are two sentences:

a) 'Sam!’
b) 'A loud ringing of one of the bells was followed by the appearance of a
smart chambermaid in the upper sleeping gallery, who, after tapping at
one of the doors, and receiving a request from within, called over the
balustrades -'Sam!'.'

Evidently, that the ‘victory’ has different importance into both sentences, in regard to extra information in both. This distinction is reflected as the phrases, which contain 'victory', weights: the first has 1, the second – 0.08; the greater weight signifies stronger emotional ‘acuteness’.
First you need to parse obtaining phrases from clauses, restoring omitted words, for sentences and paragraphs.
Next, you calculate Internal statistics, weights; where the weight refers to the frequency that a phrase occurs in relation to other phrases.
After that data is indexed by common dictionary, like Webster, and annotated by subtexts.
This is a small sample of the structured data:
this - signify - : 333333
both - are - once : 333333
confusion - signify - : 333321
speaking - done - once : 333112
speaking - was - both : 333109
place - is - in : 250000
To see the validity of technology - pick up any sentence.

Do you have a pencil?

All other technologies depend on spying, on quires, on SQL, all of them on External statistics. See IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo? Apache Hadoop and NoSQL? My technology is the only one that obtains Internal statistics directly from texts themselves.
Being structured information will search for users based on their profiles of structured data. Each and every user can get only specifically tailored for him information: there is no any privacy issue, nobody ever will know what the user got and read. (No spam!)

The personal profiles of structured data are private property, they can only be used. They have no value at all for anybody but their owners.

The technology came from Analytic Philosophy, Internal Relations Theory.

"What Does the NSA Court Ruling Mean for You and The Future of Surveillance?"
Status remains quo. In effect nothing changes. NSA got its wrist slapped. It was not told to destroy all their data and dismantle their data center in Utah. SSDD

In colonial times the British issued general warrants which allowed them to enter and search anyone's house.

Such tactics where outlawed in the Fourth Amendment "that prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and requires any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause." WIKI

Bulk collection of data is quite similar to this and the Fourth Amendment will hopefully provide for an unconstitutional ruling by the supreme court for whatever congress comes up with if it is too similar

Dan is a British expat living in Mexico. He is currently a Senior Writer and the Affiliate Optimization Manager for MakeUseOf. At various times, he has been the Social Editor, Creative Editor, and Finance Editor. He is also an Editor for MUO's sister site, Blocks Decoded and a Senior Writer for VPN Proof. Prior to his writing career, he was…